Alie Webb is the founder of the megapopular beauty franchise dry Bar. Before it all started, Alie had a career in public relations, working with clients such as Faith Hill, Paul McCartney, and Keith Urban. However, she's a professional hair stylust trained by Tony and Guy. In two thousand and eight, she began a side business called Straight at Home, which provided in home blowouts
on a referral basis in Los Angeles. When her business and popularity quickly outgrew her one woman show, she decided to expand and start Dry Bar, which to date has now done one million plus blowouts. Alie's been featured by Forbes, Inc. Magazine. She's been a guest on national television shows like The Talk. She was named in Fortune's forty Under forty, Marie Claire's sixteen most Fascinating Women, Cosmopolitans, two thirteen, Powerless in Fast Companies, one hundred
Most Creative People in Business. And as if all of this isn't enough to keep you on your toes, she even manages to fit in hosting a podcast called Raising the Bar with her brother and co founder, and recently, Alie and her team announced a new business venture Squeeze, where she is a co founder of the innovative dry Bar of massages. Today, we'll hear from Ali, who walks us through her journey to a millie. A million in sales, a million in revenue, a million followers, or a million in funding.
To amass one million of anything is a major feet and that's why we're highlighting women who have done just that. You'll hear from women who have made their mark, impacted lives, blaze trails, and amassed a millie. The reason that dry Bar really came to be was because, I mean, it's a pretty long story and starts way back. Whad I mean, I have
naturally curly Harry and dry barb is really born out of necessity. I mean I've been I've been a hair stulends for oh gosh, twenty years, and I grew up in South Florida, and I, you know, were so humid and wet outside, and I had naturally curly, frizzy hair that was very unruly, and I just feel like I'd spent my whole life trying to figure out how to, you know, just get that bouncy, shiny hair that all like the supermodels had and I was so perplexed by it and um
and it was just always one of those things that was just something I was like dying to figure out. And you know, so fast forward to going, you know, graduating high school and not like feeling like college was the right thing for me, and eventually trying some other careers, but eventually going and going to cosmetology school, which I felt like was what I was meant to do and where I was meant to be. And I worked in professional salons for you know, forever, and then I moved and was living in
New York City. I met my husband, we moved to LA I had a couple of kids. I was to stay at home mom, and I was you know, over the moon excited to be able to stay home and you know, be with my kids. And I did that for about five years, and then after five years, I kind of got a little bit of an itch to get back out and start doing something for myself again. And I just felt like I needed something else and more. And I loved my kids and I loved being a stay at home mom, but I was
ready kind of for the next chapter. So but it was supposed to be a very small chapter and I was just, you know, thought that because all of my friends and my mommy friends knew that I was a hair styles
and I could blow out their hair or whenever they wanted. I thought, you know, maybe I start a little mobile blow drive business where I'm basically my whole pitch was like, I'll come over while your baby's sleeping, because at that time I was very immersed in the mommy community in LA, and you know, charge you forty bucks and I'll come over and blow out your hair while your baby's sleeping, And that would be a great way for me to get out of the house, earn a little extra cash, and do
something I loved. Well. During that time, like like like like many things happened, you know, without you like planning them. I realized during that time that I was, first of all, getting super busy and had just started saying no to more clients that I could say yes because I didn't have enough time. And I realized there was a really big hole in the market and there was really nowhere for women to go for a great blowout at
an affordable price in a beautiful space. It's just didn't exist. And up until dry Bar, women were either going to you know, they're Coughton colors alot and overpaying for a blow for just a blowout, where Silence would much rather spend that time cutting or coloring because there was more money in that that
they could make in that time span. Or there were like the discount chains of the world, like you know, Fantastic Stams and those are great businesses, but for just a blowout and a nice experience, it wasn't right either. So that's when I went to my brother, Michael Landau and my husband, Cameron Webb. And my husband was the creative creative director and advertising agency, and my brother was and is the business side of things and was more
into business. And I said, listen, I want to turn my mobile business, which was called Straight at Home into a brick and mortar and you know, basically have instead of Niko my clients have them come to me and you know, they're both bald, and they were like, mm, is this all you want to do? Just blowout? And why not do cotton color? And you know, I explained that that was the part of the
business that I really loved the most. You know, when I used to cut hair and and then get through their cut and slow the hair out at the end. That was when I felt like the hair Soub really came to life. So I just always loved that piece of it, and um, and I wanted to create a place that was just focused on that and it just it hadn't existed at the time, so it was a lot of unknowns
and a lot of questions. And but you know, that was almost nine years ago, and we opened our first shop in Brentwood in twenty ten and just hoped for the best. And you know, I was trying this kind of new concept and you know, luckily it really resonated with women and it just took off before our eyes and it was very exciting. So today we have one hundred and well as a Friday, we'll have one hundred and seven locations. So we've grown tremendously and um, you know, my my role
in the company has certainly evolved and changed. I mean when we had a handful of stores, I was, you know, making every decision and involved in every single thing that was happening. And over time we've hired a lot of really smart people who helped make a lot of those decisions. We have a professional CEO now, so you know, I very much oversee products and
product development and PR and customer service. But it's my role is definitely evolved in different than, of course where it was, you know, nine years
ago. It is it is really interesting how I feel like, and I know this sounds kind of hokey, but I do feel like everything I did in my life really prepared me for, you know, ultimately this business and running dry Bar from you know, all the fits and stops and the wrong decisions I made in the wrong jobs I took and the right jobs I took, and jobs I worked in PR for a while, and I feel like
I really learned how to had a light. I honed that skill of how to be professional and so, you know which I feel like I'm such a testament to like, you know, you got to just follow your path and know that it's it's all like they're happening for a reason. There was so much skepticism in the early days before we opened the doors, and it was also in the middle of a recession, so you know, people were cutting back on spending, especially like the more frivolous things like beauty and all that
kind of stuff. Um, and so you know, it was just it was a slower time in the market, and and it it was really unknown, and you know, my my hope, my instinct on it was that I had gotten a glimpse of it, a very small glimpse through my mobile business that you know, women really loved when they're hairloots, right, like it gave them all the confidence. They just really liked the whole experience.
So I felt like, you know, if we can do I think it was like thirty or forty blowouts a day in our Brentwood location, which was eight which is eight chairs, you know, that would be like a good business and enough for us to like maybe a little bit more than break even, you know, but it was, it was it was really daunting because it's felt really overwhelming to get thirty to forty women in one place a day.
I mean, it just remember feeling massive to me. And I would like sit up at night and I think, like, okay, if five women come in an hour and we're open twelve hours a day, you know, I mean, it drove me a little batty because I was just nervous, you know, we wouldn't do the volume. And that really is the name of the game. It's the volume. It's like we need a lot of women, and that's kind of our real estate strategy, and you know, everything we do, it's like, we need a lot of women to
make this concept work. And it's you know, it's a relatively in and out kind of service. So so yeah, I was very you know,
fearful until we opened the doors. But man, that we actually a week before we opened, Daily Candy, which I'm sure you remember, ran a big editorial piece on us about us opening, and you know, editorial Daily Candy would always kind of break like the new hot things that were happening, and they wrote this great story about how we were coming to town, and all of a sudden, people started booking appointments on our not an app it
was really only online then because it was just Blackberries back then. And we were like, wow, you know, we have all these appointments booked for the first day, but it was still hard to believe. And then the day that we opened, I mean it was like, you know, I can't even explain the feeling and the excitement and how many women were coming in and how busy it was, and I was totally understaffed, totally unprepared,
but you know, this really resonated with women. They loved the way the space looked and felt, and you know, our sophisticated whimsy and the branding and they just women just ate it up and loved everything about it. And you know, my parents had their own business growing up, so the customer service is really important. And it was really great. I believed out of the gate, so you know, within that truly within that first week, I mean, I remember calling my brother and saying, like, Mike,
you have to find us more locations like we are. The demand is crazy. It's through the roof and we're gonna have to open more or you know, to meet all this demand. And it was like, I mean, nobody was more floored than we were. I mean, it's so we so underestimated what we were sitting on. It was pretty amazing. When women have accomplished amazing things, it makes you curious about their strengths. So I always like to ask professional women, if you had to identify it, what would
be your superpower? I think it's like it's fearlessness. You know, I've never been scared of taking risks. You know, I feel like, and I don't know if it's just my personality or in my DNA, you know, Like I mentioned, my parents had their own business, and I've always kind of operated under the kind of philosophy of like everything happens for a reason
and everything will work out. And so I feel like, and I remember when people were a bit of naysayers about this whole concept or didn't get it, you know, thinking like, no one's going to die if this doesn't work. It'll suck and we'll all lose money, and that's really unfortunate. But like we're smart, and we'll get back on our feet and we'll figure something else out and we'll get jobs or whatever, you know. And so I think that that fearlessness has kind of always been a bit of a guiding
light for me. Well, I mean there certainly were, I mean things like there was a couple of interesting things that happened in the early days, like because I how I explained, we were so busy, so fast, we really didn't know if the business is going to be when we were going to book appointments or they were just going to you know, walk in at their at their leisure, and so we had on all our collateral and on our window like Poppins welcome, you know, because we didn't know what the
behavior was going to be. And then in that first week, women were popping in without appointments and we didn't have any room for them because so many other women were making appointments, and so I mean we had to like I mean, that ended up costing us a lot of money because we had to redo all our collateral. We took that off the window, and like not that walkins aren't welcome, and we do our very best to accommodate people who
don't have appointments. But we just very quickly learned that like man, you know, women God Blossom were you know, we are like very scheduled and regimented, and we need our to know when everything is set up, and
so you know, that was something that we've learned very quickly. As well as you know, we have a call center, a pretty robust call center with over one hundred people anting the phones every day because women, you know, even though I do everything on my phone in my app, but we still a lot of women, probably fifty percent of our clientele who call in.
And that was something that we weren't expecting. And we I mean, we had the phones in of course, like you would imagine We had a phone at the front desk in Brentwood and we first opened, but like the phone was ringing constantly. The shop was so busy, So you know, if you imagine the scenario of like and I was like basically the manager. I was doing blowouts from the first station, and if I wasn't doing a
blowout, I was behind the desk like checking people in and out. And it was just like a constant flow and it was never It wasn't like again like a traditional salon where you're you're in there for two or three hours because you're getting caught in color and you know, it's like people kind of meander
to the front desk in a way. But in dry bar, it's like there's a woman basically standing in front of you every few minutes or if not more, and there's always a line, and so we couldn't answer the phone and check someone in and check someone out, and it just became a bad experience for all those people involved. So you know, I remember the first like day or two just telling me my staff, like don't answer the phone,
let it go to voicemail. We'll call everybody back, because I didn't want to give a bad experience to the person on the phone or the person standing in front of me, more importantly, the first person in our shop, you know, standing in front of me. So we, you know, very quickly realized we needed to have a call center, you know, a place where where we could answer the phone and piecing quiet and talk to our clients and figure out what they needed and where they wanted to be and
all of that. So, you know, that was such a that was such a big like oh my god moment, like how we don't know anything about the call center business. You know, I know how to do blowouts and run a salon, but that was certainly out of our wheelhouse. But you know, you adjust, and we did and we figured it out and now we have a lot of people who oversee that and so it's the price of doing business, I guess, you know, I think it's been such
an education for me. I mean, I mean such an education. I feel like I've gotten like an MBA by just you know, running this business and then having to learn how to go and that, and that really is what I've had to do, is learn to um learn all this stuff from you know, raising money to running a business to you know, there's just there's so much that, um, I didn't know. I didn't know, um, but but I wouldn't you know, I certainly wouldn't change any of
it. And and I don't know that you know, I've been asked that question before, like what do I wish that I knew? And I think
it was. It was it was certainly like like like a life flip, and I, you know, found myself working so much and I, you know, and I don't think I realized that that was coming and what was in store for me personally and the fact that I still had young kids, and it was like I was thrown into this business that not complaining at all, but it certainly was like whoa, you know, and it was like I wanted to I was so excited and wanted to grow it. But it
meant like I needed a lot more help with my kids. And luckily my mom was around to really be with my kids a lot because I just didn't want them to always be with the nanny. And so you know, it was it was certainly, um, such a such a drastic change to my life and you know, my whole world. Um. But I don't know if I had if I had known that I don't. I don't know what I would have what I would have thought I would getting into it, you know, I think I was a little bit thrown into the deep end.
But but I also kind of loved it. It's really daunting raising money, and you know, we were we were fortunate enough that my my brother Michael, was able to kind of fund most of the first store, and my husband and I put our life savings into it, and we paid our architect into equity and a lot of people in equity because we can afford to pay
them otherwise. And then the next kind of round of funding to open the first few stores came from angel investors and friends and family, and and I was very you know, lucky that I had a partner like my brother, because he had a lot of friends who had you know, we're professional investors and were in that world and able to help him and us navigate through that. But it is a really daunting thing, and there's there's so many different
ways to raise money. There's such a different path for everybody. I mean, for us, we wanted to grow very quickly because we realized we had kind of light being in a bottle and wanted to grow our footprint as fast as we could, you know, within reason, and so we couldn't grow organically. So then it's like, you know, franchising becomes an option. Raising professional money becomes an option, and so all of these things we really had to learn how to do. And I was very much in the weeds
of running the stores and managing the stylists and all of that. So that was really when you know I talk about all the time went where my brother, you know, started figuring all that out. And he didn't totally know it either, and you know, he leaned on some friends and asked and talk to anybody who would talk to him about, you know, how to
do it, and got a lot of different opinions and advice. And I was, you know, in the weeds running the stores, but you know, we had to you know, we had a lot of we started taking meetings with private equity guys, and so many of them didn't understand our business, and you know, there were so many like new terms and things that we had to figure out. But you know, it really was a great
learning experience. And I think that something you know, any any entrepreneur has to kind of go through and and find you know, whether it's your actual business partner or co founder or just a good friend to somebody who knows kind of the finance world to help you navigate through that because there's so many different ways to do it, but there's a lot of you need a lot of safe safeguards and protection and making sure that you really understand you know, the
deal terms and it's it's it's a lot, you know. And I think
that's where I was. I was very lucky and fort to have a business partner and my brother that um I didn't know it all, but learned it all, and and somebody of course that I trusted implicitly to kind of you know, water it down a lot, because it can be a lot and very confusing speaking of you know, the financial stuff, Like I don't really I don't really love that part of the business and um and I don't think it's my highest and best use, um you know, to be in the
weeds of like finance and figuring out you know, the money part of things. I just don't really enjoy that and it just doesn't like really stick with me. Um. You know, I get really excited about you know, our business and you know, and of course I pay attention to where we're doing well and where we need help, but I don't really love that part
of it. And you know, I think that it's a little bit of a double edged shore because I think the people part of our business, from both clients and and the stylists, is obviously the best part of our business, but it can also be the hardest. And you know, there's I'm sure I'm not the first person to say this. You know, it's never fun when you have to fire somebody, or you have to let somebody go, or even you know, when we have we've had t happened where we've
had really tough clients that we've had to have really hard conversations with. Um, I think I just don't love conflict and I have a hard time. I don't have like a great stomach for it. And I think by nature I'm a bit of like a people pleaser and just want to tell you what you want to hear because I want everybody to be happy. So it's been a really interesting, you know time for me too. You know, sometimes
you just you have to have the hard conversations and the tough stuff. You know, something I feel like I heard growing up from my parents time and time again of this like, you know, which is actually one of our drive ark core values is pretty is it's pretty does and that kind of notion of you know, you can be a beautiful person on the outside, but if you're not a beautiful person on the inside, it doesn't matter. You
know. It's like you have to kind of match. And my parents always kind of instilled in me, um, just you know, just to be a good person, to be nice and and I think that was also part
of their business. And they had they owned kind of older ladies clothing boutiques in South Florida, and those women were not easy and and and but I still watched how they bent over backwards for their customers, and I couldn't remember I remember like watching my mom have conversations with women who were terrible to her, but she sucked it up and was just really nice and killed them with
kindness. And you know, and I think that that was something that was very much ingrained in me and my brother and just something that I have felt is so important and and frankly it's lacking in so many businesses and people, honestly, but but in businesses, it's like for me, it's like why, you know, why would you not go above and beyond treat people a certain way. They are they are paying you to you know, to take partaking your business and you're in the service and whatever it is. So it's
always really irked me when that happens. And so it's something that I really try to live by. Um, you know of this like, you know, be nice to everybody. You never know what someone else is going through. And so I think I think that advice, which was you know, again embedded in me from the time I was a kid, was probably the thing that has always um stuck with me. And then and then when it comes to dry Bar, I feel like, um, there's so many lessons
I've learned. I think probably the two biggest ones are, you know, being open and accepting a feedback, negative feedback, whether it's about the business, whether it's about me personally, and how I've dealt with the situation or
handle the situation. Um, it's tough. It's tough to be open to negative feedback and you know, to allowing your team or your customers to know that they can tell you and that there's not going to They're not going to be met with this defensiveness on the other end, rather this like thank you for telling us and allowing us to work work on this and potentially fix it, which I think is really important to growing any business and and any person
really just knowing just being open to that. And I would be lying if I said I had learned that and I was always great at it, because I'm still not. I mean, it's still really stings when someone tells you, you know, they don't like your style or the way you're handling things, or clients didn't have a good experience and doesn't want to come to tribe er anymore. I mean, those are all like heartwrenching things to me.
But I think, especially as a leader in this organization, for me being weighing one to say I want to hear it, I want to know so I can fix it, I think also lends itself to other people having that same kind of philosophy, so that you know, these things don't just get swept under the rug and you just go about business without ever fixing some fundamental problems. I think great leaders make their teams feel empowered to make decisions even
when they make the wrong decisions. I think that there's that if you give the people on your team the autonomy to make these to make decisions, to do things on their own with out without micromanaging them, I think is is
a really important piece of leadership. And I think that's something that I really learned from our current CEO, John Heffner, who's you know, came into Drybar and was not obviously family and it was like me and my brother and my husband and my brother's wife and we were all like running the business. And when John came in, he was not related to us, so that was a plus. And with somebody who could be a little bit more uh, you know, objective or subjective about the things that we're going on in
the business, and we are. My brother and I are very reactionary by nature, and you know when there's a problem, like oh my god, this guy's falling and the whole business is over and everything's failing and we're done, you know, we have that very like you know that that kind of like you know, I guess passion and just kind of we get a little
crazy. But John really has a much more like calm and like, let's think of this through and let's not make a haste decision and and I think that that's been a really good thing for me to witness how he does that and how he operates with this team, and he really does, like you know, has this philosophy of you know, you bring really good people in and you allow them to, um, you know, make make decisions on their own, and even if that means failing, and even if that means
it's not the decision that you would have made, it's still it's it's a great way to empower your team and being able to have that open communication with them about those experiences and keep improving. Professional success can impact people in different ways. I wanted to find out from Ali how does she suggest going about dealing with the negativity that can sometimes arise from professional success. I don't feel like I've experienced that, and I feel like, you know, I feel
quite the opposite. Honestly. It's like I have I feel like I have such an incredibly strong support system of you know friends, female friends to her, um, you know friends, clients, uh, you know. I feel like the majority of my friends are probably all women founders, um you know, who own business is big and small. So maybe that's why, But I think that that's part of it too. I mean, I think it's you want to surround yourself with a support system of in my case,
women that are very supportive and understanding what you're doing. And I think the fact that most of my friends are other female founders, they get it,
they support it. Um. And it's funny because I just I just I'm not sure if you're familiar with the company Rockets of Awesome UM, but my friend Rachel is the founder of that, and she did this awesome the Awesome challenge and asked a bunch of like you know, women in her network to post about it, and and and she texted me that she was like so Florida about how many people just did it and just show did what she asked just for her business and and I and my response was to her was,
I know, it's amazing. And I feel the same way like I feel like when I call on my kind of tribe of women and and and I'm so busy and I don't have time for like anything that it's not like, um, this is like a group of women that I'm seeing once a week and we all are getting together all the time and chatting. It's like it's it's more like we see each other at events, We text sometimes, Instagram sometimes, but there's not like there's not a lot of bonding that is always
going on. But there's just this this interesting underlying thread you know, of probably like twenty to forty women I could probably rattle off that I know between like LA and New York obviously because I live in LA, that you know, would would show up for me unequivocally and would would help me with anything
I needed, and and and vice versa. You know, that's the I think takeaway is that you want to surround yourself with people who are going to surround you and and very quickly cut out the people who who aren''t going to. I'm really big into self care. I mean I can't. I can't highlight it enough. I mean from you know, I pretty much exercise or go on a hike daily or a walk. I mean, I feel like I need to be like outside in fresh air and like not you know,
tether to my phone and just have like kind of that mental break. I really try to get that every day. U and I you know, I mean I feel like I'm either I try to get like a massage once a week, and I make sure I get like a facial at least once a month. And I'm also I love like trying new treatments and I do this like emphatic drainage thing, and I'm really into into taking care of myself.
And I think that the mental part of it really comes from you making sure I'm exercising for of course my body and the way I look, but more for like the mental release that I think is really important. I think an area that I have to work on is getting more sleep, because I tend to be a bit of a night owl. And I was recently on a panel with Arianna Huffington and she was that was like she of going back to that how she's like makes work bad decisions if she doesn't have enough sleep,
she's not nice to people she doesn't have enough sleep. And I was like, man, that is so true. And I'm the worst because I really relish like my time and my kids are asleep and I can just like you know, tune out watch a good show. But I think that's sleep is the other area I'm working on getting more of. Gosh. I think success comes in a lot of a lot of different forms. I mean, there's there's so many things that I'm so incredibly proud of with you know, with
my life with dry Bar. I mean, with dry Bar, if you feel like it's it's too part. I mean, first of all, the fact that like we are, you know, we're doing over a million blowouts a year, and which means we're making a lot of women happy. And I very quickly learned, which I don't think I completely realized when we first started dry Bar, but how incredible dry Bar and a great blowout makes a woman feel. And I think I thought, I don't think I realized the
impact of that when we first started. And but to see the way women have the confidence that women get from getting a great blowout, and not just the great blowout, but being in the space that they really feel comfortable and safe and and that people are treating them really nicely, and you know,
they walk out with this pep in their step. And you know, I mean, I have women who tell me they don't go to a board meeting without a blow out, and they don't go on an important date or job interview, or just want to feel good before they pick up their kids.
You know, it's it really truly runs the gamut. And that's something that I've witnessed over the last nine years that I'm like, wow, you know, I would never have thought when we started this business of just blow drying hair that it would have such a tremendous impact on the way women feel so so so that is probably one of the biggest kind of pillars of success for
me. And then, you know, on the flip side of it are the fact that our stylists that we've we have over thirty five hundred stylists across the country, which is thirty five hundred jobs, not to mention one hundred or so people in our and our headquarters and our managers, and we've created quite a few jobs, which I think, you know, in this day
and age, is something to be very very proud of. Um. In addition to the fact that this is a whole new path for stylists, you know, to take, whether you are just coming out of beauty school, you've been in the industry a couple of years, or you've been in the industry fifteen years. You know, dry boards is another avenue of growth and development, you know, where you can be a stylist and do great blowouts.
And then you know, if you're you know, have some some skills and the manager kind of arena that you can move on and become a manager, which, by the way, the majority of our stores are managed by you know, people who started as a stylist and we just saw something special, or they wanted to grow and and so we've turned them into managers, or they've gone on to become product educators or grown into our corporate office. So there's there's a lot of different opportunities and I'm so proud of that.
And then there's also things like stylists who like live in you know, Arizona and decide they want to move to la or New York City, like they can just but we're going to drive bar there. And and the fact that we have that you know, opportunity and flexibility is something I'm most proud of.
Um. And then I think we're on a personal note, um, you know, having you know, I have two really great kids and a great husband, and you know, we have a nice little life, and I think that it's it's really important and great that my kids are seeing, you know, how hard we work, and there's definitely been a lot of sacrifice involved in growing this business, but for my kids to see that you know, Mommy and Daddy work really hard so we can have this nice life
and for them to grow up the way I did, you know, understanding that nothing is just given to you and you have to work really hard, and then them getting that life, that that education by just watching us and you know, makes me feel really good and proud. I'm a Yana Angel and thank you for listening to Emilie produced by Mazie Media. If you enjoy this episode, you can subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode
because we have more amazing women lined up to share. You can follow Amazing Media on Instagram and be sure to join me next week for another episode of a Millie